Why Asia’s Insurgencies Are Europe’s Shame

Dec. 11 (Bloomberg) -- It wasn’t an incredible photo-op,
and it’s unlikely to be included in this month’s valedictory
roundup of 2012 highlights. In fact, it was barely reported.

One of this year’s most remarkable events, however, was the
agreement between the Philippine government and the insurgent
group Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

If successful, it may not only terminate decades of
secessionist violence in Mindanao, the second largest island in
the Philippines; it may also inspire hope in a wide swath of
Asian countries damaged, politically as well as economically, by
internecine conflicts.

Divide-and-rule European imperialists, favoring one ethnic
group and persecuting or neglecting another, or drawing
arbitrary lines in the sand or the grass, originally transformed
social and religious differences into political antagonisms
within Asian societies. Their local opponents -- mostly educated
natives -- hardened religious and ethnic identities by turning
them into a basis of anti-imperialist solidarity.

Ethnic Patchworks

In the end, the principle of self-determination was widely
exported from relatively homogenous Europe to multicultural
Asia, where it was embraced by rising native elites. The result
was the proliferation of hastily and poorly imagined national
communities -- unwieldy nation-states where patchworks of
relatively autonomous groups and individuals with multiple,
overlapping identities had existed.

Since then, postcolonial rulers eager to hold on to their
inheritance -- centralized states, administrations and large,
resource-rich territories -- have made the map of Asia bleed
red.

Tamils in Sri Lanka, the Pattani Muslims in Thailand,
Baloch secessionists in Pakistan, Uighurs in China’s Xinjiang
province, India’s Kashmiri Muslims and northeastern minorities -
- there is barely an Asian nation-state where centralizing
governments haven’t fought, often with brute military force, to
hold down religious and ethnic minorities.

The secessionists have occasionally succeeded, if after
much horrific bloodshed, as in East Pakistan and East Timor.
More often they have looked to be upholding doomed causes.
But the tremendous strain of fighting them has had uniformly
devastating results, whether in Indonesia, Thailand or Sri
Lanka: an enhanced political and economic role for men in
uniform, the diminishment of rule of law and the loss of civil
liberties.

The imperative to uphold territorial integrity turned the
army into the most powerful institution early on in Pakistan,
Indonesia and Myanmar, and set back prospects for democracy for
decades. The Javanese leader Sukarno prepared his own demise by
frequently deploying the army to suppress disaffection across
the Indonesian archipelago.

More recently, Thailand’s former General Sonthi
Boonyaratglin, who had been empowered by then Prime Minister
Thaksin Shinawatra to crush the insurgency by Pattani Muslims,
went on to lead a military coup against his civilian boss. In
India-ruled Kashmir, the local military chiefs openly overrule
the state’s elected chief minister.

Even in countries with stronger traditions of civilian rule
and electoral democracy, such as India and Sri Lanka, an
authoritarian-minded nationalism has productively deployed
ethnic and religious minorities as a foil.

Malaysia Compromised

Racial politics has deeply compromised Malaysia’s great
potential. India’s Hindu nationalists rose to power on a program
of demonizing Muslims. The more recent success of Sri Lanka’s
Sinhalese strongman Mahinda Rajapaksa, the country’s president,
confirms that in large parts of Asia, closely identifying your
nation with its racial, religious and ethnic majority can still
bring you huge electoral harvests.

Fearing loss of likely support among Myanmar’s Buddhist
majority, even Aung San Suu Kyi is reluctant to denounce the
disenfranchisement of her country’s Rohingya Muslims. Her stance
on the militarized state’s longstanding battles with the Kayin,
Shan, Chin and Kayah minorities is not much clearer.

Myanmar’s military ruler, Thein Sein, renewed cease-fires
with these obdurate secessionists. But violence in Kachin State
in the resource-rich north has worsened.

It would be too optimistic to expect improvements as
Myanmar’s economy is integrated into global networks of trade
and finance. The promise of quick and great prosperity is likely
to deepen, not heal, old divisions. Indeed, what look like
ethnic and ancient hatreds often conceal very modern battles
over precious resources -- minerals and fossil fuels -- in
ethnic-minority regions.

Pakistan’s Baloch as well as Myanmar’s Kachin separatists
claim to fight for a fair share of benefits from the riches
extracted from their lands. Furthermore, predatory war
economies, from timber and prostitution rackets in Kashmir to
gem smuggling on the Thai-Myanmar border, have struck deep roots
in many Asian borderlands.

Power here has long flowed out of gun barrels and, until
the announcement of the peace accord in the Philippines in
October, it wasn’t easy to see how this could change.
Brokered by Malaysia, the deal between Manila and the Moro
Islamic Liberation Front paves the way to radically enhanced
autonomy for the Muslim-dominated southern region of Mindanao.

Greater federalization, which includes clear guarantees on
the sharing of natural resources and land, cultural and
religious rights, may also be the way out for countries that
have frittered away too much national energy and resources in
affirmations of sovereignty.

Diverse Mosaic

The agreement in the Philippines is a timely reminder of
the much less fraught relationships that have existed and can
exist between the periphery and the center and between majority
and minority communities.

The European idea of the nation-state, realized after much
horrific bloodshed in Europe itself, was always a poor fit for
Asia’s diverse mosaic.

Joseph Roth, who grew up in the multinational Hapsburg
empire, was appalled by the imperatives of modern nationalism,
according to which “every person must belong to a definite
nationality or race” in order to be treated as an individual
citizen. Roth, a Jew, suspected that members of minority groups,
like himself, would be relegated to third-class citizenship, and
vicious prejudice against them would be made respectable in the
new nation-states built on the ruins of multinational empires.

The ethnic cleansers of 20th century Europe proved him
right. It required a monstrous crime and a repentant political
imagination to institute peace between warring European nations
and soften attitudes toward minorities.

The battle against bigotry is far from over; Europe’s long
and violent past today looms over its inevitably multicultural
future.

For Asian nations beset by their own present and potential
ethnic cleansers, it is even more important to remember the
relative youth of sectarian nationalism on the continent -- and
the long centuries when it did not exist.

(Pankaj Mishra is the author of “From the Ruins of Empire:
The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia” and a
Bloomberg View columnist, based in London and Mashobra, India.
The opinions expressed are his own.)